A backlog for low-income housing assistance leaves more than 10,000 households struggling

View full size John Berry / The Post-Standard"It's harder now to turn people away because I know how bad it is," said Patricia McBride, Section 8 clerical supervisor for the Syracuse Housing Authority. This filing cabinet holds some of the more than 10,000 active applications for subsidized housing.

Eight large file drawers in a high-rise office on Gifford Street hold a story of housing despair in Syracuse.

The office is the headquarters of the Syracuse Housing Authority’s Section 8 program. It’s where people who have little money and live in cramped or broken-down apartments apply for rental vouchers so they can move to a better place.

The file drawers are packed with their applications. Each green sheet, enclosed in its own manila envelope, contains a tenant’s dream of a safe, affordable apartment. But most of those dreams will go unrealized.

Last week, the waiting list for Section 8 vouchers stood at 10,563 applicants, representing about 15,076 people. That’s equal to about 10 percent of the population of Syracuse, where most of the SHA’s vouchers are used.

The federal government gives the SHA enough money to pay for 3,535 vouchers, and virtually all are taken. Only when a tenant gives up a voucher — through improved circumstances, eviction or death — is it turned over to someone on the waiting list.

The list only continues to grow. Last year, 327 vouchers were turned over while 1,441 new households applied.

The authority is now processing applications filed in early 2008. The backlog is so great that it stopped taking new applications in September.

“It was just false hope,” said Patricia McBride, clerical supervisor for the Section 8 office.

The Section 8 program began under President Richard Nixon in 1974 to provide monthly payments to private property owners who built or rehabilitated housing and rented it cheaply to low-income tenants. In 1983, under President Ronald Reagan, tenant-based vouchers were added to the mix.

The vouchers allow low-income people to find apartments wherever they want, as long as the price is right, the apartment passes inspection and the landlord agrees to accept them. In most cases, the vouchers cover about two-thirds of the rent and utilities.

A family of four in Onondaga, Madison or Oswego county can make no more than $20,000 to be eligible. In the Syracuse area, the average recipient’s annual income is $12,617, which includes public assistance payments.

But even within that group, only the most severe cases are getting vouchers now. They are mostly people living in substandard conditions and paying more than half their income in rent and utilities. Preference also is given to domestic violence victims, people who have been displaced from their homes and those with elevated lead levels in their blood.

McBride said her office gets 35 to 50 calls a day from people trying to find out where they are on the list and what they have to do to get a higher spot. Most hang up disappointed.

“You hear stories that are just heartbreaking, and I can’t do a thing about it,” she said. “It’s harder now to turn people away because I know how bad it is.”

‘It’s depressing’

India McLaurin was turned away for four years before getting a letter from the SHA March 3 telling her that her application was finally at the top of the list. If everything checks out, she will get a voucher within weeks.

When she applied in 2008, McLaurin, 26, was working 30 to 35 hours a week making phone calls at a market research company and barely getting by with her two children in a Liverpool apartment complex. She was hoping the voucher would help her through a tough time.

Instead, she ended up at the bottom of the SHA’s list. For a while, she called the authority every day to get updates on her application.

But even after her long wait, she only got to the top because her situation grew worse. In late 2010, she lost her job during a company reorganization and moved into her father’s small house in Cicero. For the past 16 months, she and her son and daughter have shared a single room in the house. The SHA labeled her “displaced” and moved her up the list.

She is going to school full time at OCM BOCES while working 20 hours a week. She expects to graduate with a licensed practical nurse credential in September, but she doesn’t yet have the income to afford her own place.

“It’s very, very depressing,” she said. “I don’t like feeling like a burden.”

First come, first served

Long waits for Section 8 vouchers are common in Syracuse and elsewhere. But the economic downturn has increased the waits to absurd lengths.

With the national housing crisis making it difficult for people to buy homes or even stay in their current ones, competition for rental housing has skyrocketed. And people who can least afford the rent are the biggest losers.

A 2011 report from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development found that the number of households with “worst case” housing needs grew by 20 percent from 2007 to 2009 — from 5.9 million to 7.1 million. It was the biggest two-year jump since at least 1985.

People with “worst case” needs are those with low incomes who either paid more than half their incomes for rent or lived in “severely inadequate” conditions, or both.

But while the needs have increased, the number of vouchers issued by the federal government has stayed level over the past several years. The only new vouchers being made available in the Syracuse area are reserved for homeless veterans. HUD announced last week that 35 more of those vouchers will soon be made available here.

In addition to the SHA list, there is a waiting list of some 550 people at Christopher Community, a nonprofit housing provider in Syracuse that issues 648 Section 8 vouchers.

“You feel for these people,” says Bob Weismore, the agency’s Section 8 director. “They call up here and say, ‘I have kids.’ I wish I could say, ‘Go here,’ or ‘Go there,’ but there’s no answer.”

Section 8 vouchers have never been available to all the people who qualify. Unlike federal programs like food stamps and Medicaid — or the mortgage interest tax deduction for homeowners — subsidized housing for the poor is not an entitlement. It largely operates on a first-come, first-served basis.

Beyond Section 8, people are lining up for spots in traditional public housing complexes, too. The waiting list for complexes run by the SHA now tops 2,500, compared to 800 in 2000, said David Paccone, the SHA’s senior management analyst.

But the Section 8 logjam is the most dramatic. In Los Angeles, the wait can be as long as 10 years. In East Point, Ga., a city outside Atlanta, 30,000 people showed up one day in 2010 after the housing authority there opened its Section 8 list for the first time in eight years. More than 60 people were injured in the crush.

Last July in Dallas, thousands of people showed up before 6 a.m. on the day the housing authority opened its list. There was a frantic rush to the front, but no one was seriously injured.

“It’s just kind of other-worldly,” said Linda Couch, senior vice president for policy and research for the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington, D.C. “It just shows the extremes that people will go to to get stable housing.”

Moves to cut program

Sharon Sherman, executive director of the Greater Syracuse Tenants Network, argues that an influx of Section 8 vouchers in Syracuse would help not only the city’s poorest tenants, but its deteriorating housing stock.

That’s because landlords who agree to accept Section 8 payments must maintain their apartments to the point where they can pass an annual inspection. And in many cases, she says, they can afford to charge a somewhat higher rent — and be guaranteed timely payment of at least two-thirds of the rent each month through the voucher.

“Basically it’s good for the landlord, it’s good for the economy and it’s good for the tenant,” Sherman said.

Deficit hawks in Congress don’t buy that. They are looking for ways to cut the voucher program, which is projected to cost $19 billion this year and cover 2.2 million households. That’s a slight increase over the current year, largely because of increasing rents and the declining incomes of tenants, which cause each voucher to cost more.

The SHA’s 3,535 vouchers average about $475 a month per tenant. The budget for SHA’s voucher program this year is $22.8 million.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has tried to mitigate the rising cost of the vouchers by cutting the administrative budgets of local housing authorities. That move has limited the ability of the authorities — including the SHA — to turn around vouchers quickly when they become available.

A bill introduced March 6 by Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, would set a five-year time limit on the use of vouchers unless a tenant is elderly or disabled. It would also require all tenants over 18 who are not elderly or disabled to participate in “work activities” for at least 20 hours a week.

Chabot calls Section 8 “a broken program that rewards dependency on government with our tax dollars.”

There is no time limit on how long people can have vouchers, as long as they qualify economically. HUD is piloting a number of “Moving to Work” programs, which allow selected housing authorities to experiment with programs to make voucher recipients more self-sufficient. At this point, the SHA does not have a Moving to Work effort.

Chabot’s bill so far has no co-sponsors, and Couch, of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said it is unlikely to advance very far. But she said it does reflect the efforts by some members of Congress to reduce the program. She argues that the vouchers are good economics because they safeguard people from problems that would be even more costly.

“It’s much cheaper to house someone with a voucher than it is for someone to live in a shelter,” she said.

Couch said more than half of Section 8 tenants use their vouchers for fewer than five years, and many who use them longer are either elderly or disabled. While some tenants in Syracuse hold on to their vouchers for 20 years or more, the average length of use is seven years, Section 8 coordinator Tracy DeLapp said.

A game changer

Not everyone on the Section 8 waiting list is in desperate need. Some may have improved their circumstances as their applications languished and would not qualify for a voucher if their name finally reached the top of the list. Others earn enough money to scrape by without the voucher, sometimes with help from family or friends.

People receiving public assistance get an allocation within their basic grant to help pay for rent, although that usually is not nearly as much as Section 8 would provide, and it can only be used for five years. And developmentally disabled renters who have applied for Section 8 vouchers might be eligible for rent assistance from the state until they can get a voucher.

But for many of those on the lengthening Section 8 list, finally getting a voucher is a game changer.

India McLaurin says that is certainly true for her. If all the paperwork goes through and she is issued a voucher, she’ll use it to help pay for a three-bedroom apartment in Liverpool — enough for separate rooms for herself, her son and her daughter. Then, if her LPN credential can get her a good enough job, she should be able to hand the voucher back and make it on her own.

“That would be awesome,” she said. “I think that’s what the program is designed to do — to be a crutch, but also to help you find your way.”